Tim Curry’s Final Interview: What He Actually Said About Aging, Health, and Death
In one of his last on-camera interviews, given to “CBS Sunday Morning” in October 2025 while promoting his memoir “Vagabond,” Tim Curry spoke candidly with host Ben Mankiewicz about growing older following his 2012 stroke, and about how he’d come to think about mortality in the years since.
Curry reflected that he’d reached an age he hadn’t necessarily expected to see, noting that his own father had died of a stroke when Curry was still a child. Asked about death, he was clear that it didn’t frighten him. “I try to avoid it, as I think we all do,” Curry said. “But I suspect that in the end, I will welcome it.” He elaborated with characteristic humor: “I think it may be very comforting to go bye-bye — and I want to earn it!” In a related comment, he added that he wanted to “earn the privilege of not being here,” while stressing he wasn’t rushing toward that outcome: “I’m not galloping towards it. I may well embrace it.”
Much of the conversation also centered on the physical toll of his 2012 stroke, which required brain surgery after doctors found two blood clots in his brain and left him needing a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Curry described ongoing chronic pain on his left side, explaining that even light touch on his left arm or hand could be excruciating. He also spoke about what the role of acting had meant to him across his career, telling Mankiewicz he loved how it gave him “the freedom of being somebody else.”
Curry made similar remarks at a public appearance the year before, during a 50th-anniversary screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles in September 2025.
Speaking alongside fellow cast members Patricia Quinn, Barry Bostwick, and Nell Campbell, he told the audience, “I still can’t walk, which is why I’m in this silly chair, and that’s very limiting. So I won’t be singing and I won’t be dancing very soon.” He also recalled the moment his stroke began, saying he was in the middle of a massage and hadn’t noticed anything wrong until his massage therapist insisted on calling an ambulance.
Curry died Tuesday night at his home in Los Angeles. Following the news, longtime friend and “Clue” co-star Michael McKean shared a remembrance on X, writing that their final conversation together “was about life and love and laughter,” and describing Curry’s passing after years of declining health as, in a way, “a blessing.” “Our blessing was that we had Tim Curry in our lives,” McKean wrote. “RIP, my friend.”
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